Monday, March 15, 2010

Too complex for its own good

This is a bit late for The Pi Day, but still interesting: an intricate crop circle in England encodes the value of pi! How? Look at the image below; it consists of ten concentric arcs joined by short line segments. Reading from inside out, the angular lengths of those arcs equal 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, and 4 tenths of a circle (the value of pi rounded to the ninth decimal digit is 3.141592654).


I'd like to point out to the designers of this image, whoever they are, that there's a method of graphically encrypting the value of pi that is much simpler as well as infinitely more precise than what they've done. This method consists of drawing a damn circle.

1 comment:

  1. But then they couldn't tell everyone how clever they are! Or, they'd be too simple to be clever.

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